Why there will never be another Da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci was an artist who became a scientist by asking what underlay the world he so brilliantly depicted. Behind the asymmetric smile of the “Mona Lisa” lay a complex interplay of facial muscles; in sketching a waterfall, Da Vinci became fascinated by fluid dynamics. (Stefan Klein’s thought-provoking book, Leonardo’s Legacy, provides a persuasive account of this process of discovery.) The exact extent of Da Vinci’s innovations are a matter of debate, but surely there is no dispute that he was one of western civilisation’s great geniuses.

Yet there is no escaping the fact that Da Vinci was able to achieve so much, so broadly, because so little was known. It was possible to make leaps forward in scientific understanding armed with little more than a keen eye and a vivid imagination.

Those times are long gone. Approximately 3,000 scientific articles are published per day – roughly one every 10 seconds of a working day. We can now expect that these papers will, each year, cite around five million previous publications. And the rate of production of scientific papers is quadrupling every generation. (All these estimates are based on data from the Institute for Scientific Information.) The percentage of human knowledge that one scientist can absorb is rapidly heading towards zero. This side of a new Dark Age, there will never be another Da Vinci.

Benjamin Jones, an economist at Northwestern University, has been monitoring these trends for some years. The typical science paper or patent, finds Jones, is now produced by a large team. The specialisation of each of that team’s members, to the extent that it can be deduced, is narrower than before. And the members of the team are also older. All of this follows quite plausibly from the drift away from the world of Da Vinci: as the sum of human knowledge swells, individual researchers must spend longer and longer acquiring ever smaller slivers of it, before they are in a position to make their own contributions.

This means that funding new ideas that matter is almost certainly getting more and more expensive. By itself that fact need not be too disturbing: we can afford to spend more on science, and there are more qualified scientists across the world than ever. But it also suggests that scientific and technological innovation is, more than ever before, an organisational problem – and an organisational problem to which we have probably devoted too little attention.

I think we need to do more to combine the best features of public-sector and private-sector innovation. Governments have the long-term perspective and the financial firepower to fund the really big projects, while small technology start-ups, funded by venture capitalists, have the collective ability to take risks and attempt a huge range of different approaches. It should not be beyond human ingenuity to devise government grants that are more pluralistic and take bigger risks.

But there is more going on here than funding. Benjamin Jones points out that scientific institutions and science policy have yet to catch up with changing trends in science. Peer review, patent evaluations and grants all tend to rely on the expertise of individuals – expertise that is less and less likely to be able to cover the necessary bases. Science has always struggled with cross-disciplinary work, but now that disciplines are becoming so narrow, cross-disciplinary work is unavoidable.

Perhaps the most important discovery in Jones’s work is the ageing of scientists. Scientists may have to wait longer before reaching the frontiers of scientific knowledge – but who will keep them funded and engaged as they make the trip? No wonder Wall Street and the City find it so easy to recruit disaffected young physicists.

“Governments have the long-term perspective and the financial firepower to fund the really big projects”

Why would you expect a government to have a long-term perspective? Long term planning ultimately depends on secure property rights, and policians in a democracy have very insecure rights in their political property. Surely you have noticed the tendency to focus on what the unemployment rate or inflation rate will be at the next election.

Of course, politicians claim to have a long term perspective. But that’s a way of concealing the evidence that their expenditures are not actually producing the advertised results–pie in the sky by and by.

For the big example, consider Stalin’s economic development. He couldn’t pretend to the Russian people that they were actually well off, but he could, for quite a while, pretend that their current sacrifices were building a future communism richer than capitalism.

“Governments have the long-term perspective and the financial firepower to fund the really big projects […]”

Really?
In a representative government, you’d expect government to have the same perspective as its governed citizens.
If people want to invest in the long-term, or take risks, then private investment already offers such choices. Also, public choice theory suggests that politicians and other caretakers of public property have misaligned incentives and probably shorter time horizons.

It depends on your field of study. Linus Torvalds and David Heinemeier Hansson were amateurs in their field when they did their ground breaking work. How old was Tim Berners-Lee, the self taught computer scientist?

You raise some particularly salient points. There’s no doubt that many disciplines will continue their trend towards extreme degrees of specialisation and it’s quite fascinating to consider the implications…

Unfortunately the research frontier is not the only place where cracks are appearing. Consider the ‘basic’ undergraduate education; in some subjects the three year format has become seriously constrained leading to the necessity of a fourth or even fifth year (in many cases only available by way of a self-funded masters) _before_ one can even think about progressing to ‘advanced’ study and research. In other words, for some students, learning “just the basics” for an entry level role in the area is taking longer then ever before. In the context of ever increasing specialisation perhaps this is entirely to be expected.

We will not have Da vinci again, but will still have genuis.
What you call science is actually the industrialisation of science. This industrialization gives a better hope to make science progress at a pace needed by the economy.
Da Vinci was genuis by change or by culture, but it could no be planned and budgeted.
That’s the real difference in my opinion, even if i do agree that the amount of papers grows geometrically , as well as the number of people to produce them.
Still we can have again a genuis that will deeply change a paradigm, like Turing for computers.

Although your assertion is mathematically sound, do account for the fact that Da Vinci devoted his entire life to learning. And interdisciplinary learning at that!

While I won’t argue that the sheer volume of knowledge swirling today is exponentially greater than 500 years ago, its also very true that the type of education Da Vinci received, mentor-disciple, is almost non-existant today. The kind of personality he had, free-flowing (procrastinating and whimsical) and curious, is not suited to the current society’s reward structure; in fact, its discourage by all but the very best of the schools.

Sure, Da Vinci didn’t have to learn calculus, but just how do you explain the amount of detail his work shows? He conceptualized SCUBA generations ago. In his design for underwater breathing apparatus, Da Vinci, was very particular about the details. Details that people today use computer simulations to figure out, when not the experience itself.

And finally, Leonardo may have had less to learn because everything was as intuitive as the physical world, but the situation today is not so different. We are now closer to first principles than ever. Tomorrow’s Da Vinci won’t solve puzzles, he will build them.

I’m an admirer of da Vinci. When you say that “Yet there is no escaping the fact that Da Vinci was able to achieve so much, so broadly, because so little was known.” – I don’t believe that’s a very true assertion. There is just as much to know, learn, study and ‘discover’ now as then. The question is – does anyone have the time and resources to do so? In addition currently this is a world where specialization is high encouraged. Attempting to be a da Vinci is neither practical for making a living and in some cases, neither is it met with approval.

So reconsider. Knowledge is not finite. Knowledge is interpreting reality. I am confident that there are people who have novel ways of doing so.

What makes you think you understand the genius of Da Vinci and can tell his mindset was unique?
He was a short sleeper (look it up).
And used this for polyphasic sleep (look it up).
For a greater plasticity to become a polymath (look it up).
None of this is mentioned in your text. Most of the stuff he invented has already been known before, but was forgotten. Your text is a great proof that much will be forgotten too and be re-invented. Most stuff that is seen as ahead of the times today, was seen as ahead of the times in the twenties last century and then discarded as crazy stuff.
One of his biggest ressources was lucid dreaming (LOOK IT UP)!

I agree with your analysis Tim, so will restrict myself to the pedantic point that it’s not correct to refer to him as ‘da Vinci’ — this was not a surname, in the modern sense. It was more a qualification that served to distinguish him from other Leonardos. (So eg. if he’d had children, they would not have been ‘da Vinci’.) If you need to shorten his name, just ‘Leonardo’ is preferable.

I often wonder how much individuals could achieve today if they had a good protector paying them without demanding a financial return before the end of the budget cycle and the need to file progress reports and KPIs on a weekly basis…